Sunday, November 05, 2006

USA Today is changing their business model to focus more on the use of news capturing and publishing like websites like digg.com do: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/media/0,72067-0.html

In my observation, this starts a new area of the 'old' publishing industry starting to break down their old structures (pushed by dramatic losses in revenue) to embrass the new internet based technologies.

interesting to watch what and who is coming next. I will keep you posted.

Friday, September 01, 2006

This article describes very well why companies should look into utilizing Social Network Analysis (SNA) for corporate purposes. Using an example from Mars, it highlights the benefits achieved by using such a capability.

Friday, August 04, 2006

A relatively new VOIP allows to initiate making phone calls from the internet. The really cool thing: making call to members land- and mobile lines are free. Calls to non-members are really cheap. Give it a try - www.jajah.com. you can also use the productivity links provided by InsightKnowledge Inc.: http://www.insightknowledge.com.

Friday, July 28, 2006

Bill Gates is looking for a Program Officer for Knowledge Management in the Education area of the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation. This is great news, for that it entails that Knowledge Management has made it (once again) on the radar of top executives. If you are a KM professional with applicable experience, don't wait - send your resume for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. If you are in management in any company around the world, think again about the importance of managing knowledge for the long-term success of your company.LINK

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

As surprising as it seems, employees of the venerable British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), have been using Internet technologies such as instant messaging (IM) and Wikis, to beef up their knowledge and better collaborate within the company's social culture:

Monday, June 12, 2006

Please join the KM Chicago group on Tuesday, June 12th, 5:00 to 7:00 PM at Allstate Insurance in Northbrook, in the South Plaza building, G Auditorium for aReport from the Front Lines of KM Offshoring, Lisa Beckers, Americas Regional Knowledge Manager for Deloitte Consulting LLP

Lisa Beckers, Americas Regional Knowledge Manager for Deloitte Consulting LLP (a division of Deloitte & Touche) has had extensive experience with offshoring of knowledge management activities at her recent position with Heidrick & Struggles, which she left 6 months ago, and also has experience with it at Deloitte Consulting. She will discuss why her organizations decided to offshore and how well it worked; what activities lend themselves to offshoring and tips for a successful implementation. How flat IS the world of knowledge management? We're sure Lisa's comments will generate a lively audience discussion about the pros and cons of offshoring KM activities.

Speaker:Lisa Beckers is responsible for understanding the priorities and strategy of Deloitte Consulting Americas regional leadership and translating that into the global KM strategy, along with the other regional KM managers. Her current focus is to develop performance measures for KM firmwide for Deloitte Consulting, including reward and recognition programs. Prior to Deloitte Consulting, Lisa spent 10 years at Heidrick & Struggles International, a global executive recruitment company, where she held a number of roles with the company including Global Practices Information Manager and Business Process Reengineering Manager. All her roles included knowledge management – from creating a KM function, to developing offshore activities as well as taxonomy redesign. Lisa held several research-focused roles before that in engineering and law. She holds a graduate degree in Library & Information Science from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and an undergraduate degree in English from University of California, Berkeley.

Lisa will speak at the downtown location of KM Chicago (Factiva offices). For those connecting from afar:

Friday, May 05, 2006

The next meeting of KM Chicago, May 9th, will feature a panel of faculty from several area schools which teach knowledge management. Panelists will describe their approach to knowledge management and we will open the floor for discussion of these programs and KM education and certification in general. Please come and enjoy the discussion.

As always, we meet the 2nd Tuesday of the month from 5-7 pm in two locations: Allstate in Northbrook and Factiva in the Loop. Please check http://kmchicago.blogspot.com for more information.

Thursday, May 04, 2006

The next meeting of KM Chicago, May 9th, will feature a panel of faculty from several area schools which teach knowledge management. Panelists will describe their approach to knowledge management and we will open the floor for discussion of these programs and KM education and certification in general. Please come and enjoy the discussion.

As always, we meet the 2nd Tuesday of the month from 5-7 pm in two locations: Allstate in Northbrook and Factiva in the Loop. Please check the sidebar at http://kmchicago.blogspot.com/ for directions.

Monday, May 01, 2006

Todays tips is about the combined usage of two different tools to increase your personal knowledge management capabilities. Take a look at this. It shows the usage of the Protopage tool in combination with InsightKnowledge Inc.'s SharingInsight personal knowledge management portal. You can give it a try yourself by signing up for a free account with Protopage and a free account with InsightKnowledge and posting the above link in the UserMenu section (marked with a '+' at the top left). Please feel free to discuss your experiences in the related forum on InsightKnowledge.

Monday, April 10, 2006

KM Chicago has a presentation coming up about Personal Knowledge Management.Check out more information at http://kmchicago.blogspot.com.Stefan Lafloer is an organizational intelligence and knowledge management senior project manager and management consultant. As the CKO of InsightKnowledge Inc., he is focusing on strategic business consulting and project management in the knowledge management (KM) and organizational intelligence (OI) area. He also is guest speaker for KM at DePaul University in Chicago, and VP of KMChicago, as well as moderator for multiple large scale KM focused discussion groups with thousands of participants on Orkut and Yahoo. In 14 years of business experience he has build a successful track record of managing the creation of e-business solutions, identifying and delivering complex process improvements and optimizing information flows in global companies. He has strong expertise in managing projects, designing information systems and using content- , document- and knowledge management technologies, as well as organizational intelligence concepts to create a competitive advantage.To drive the development of KM and OI, Stefan spends a lot of time and effort on research around topics of OI and KM. Tonight Stefan is presenting his findings on - Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)-.His presentation will include an overview of what PKM is, a research and market analysis on PKM, and a demo of several open source systems that can be used for personal knowledge management. The focus of this session will be to provide the participants with hands-on, practical knowledge (information, links, tools) on how to apply PKM to their own specific knowledge needs.For further information about the speaker, please visit: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stefanlafloer and http://www.insightknowledge.com

Friday, March 31, 2006

Now here is an interesting article. A study of over 1000 CxO's projects that Knowledge Workers, Collaboreation and personalization will be critical to a companies success in the future. So how is this prediction different from other predictions that had said that KM will change everything ? And then it had not happened ?Looking around market activities, company strategies, development of professions, job market and other developments - it all seems to steer towards a global economy that has to be flexible and adaptive. Products will need to be customizable to a customers specific needs. Inventing, creating, marketing and support will need to be functions provided by someone specialized in this area. All of this can only be achieved if we break down the paradigm of having to be in the same phyical location in order to work together effectively. Technoloy (wireless, video communication, etc.) is developing rapidely towards allowing us to communication and collaborate anywhere with anybody with an increasing set of functionality. With this in mind, the article makes sense. I would be interested to hear about your point of view.Original source: http://finanzen.net/news/news_detail.asp?NewsNr=385034

Friday, March 17, 2006

If you have not checked out http://www.indeed.com, you should do so. It is a google for jobs, searching through the internet for openings. One interesting feature is that you can create a graph for how often a keyword appears in job postings, giving you some idea about how sought for a certain job may be. Look at the trend analysis for Knowledge Management: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=%22knowledge+management%22.

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

This article referes to Talent Management as similar to Knowledge Management:

Talent Management as a DisciplineWebCPA - New York,NY,USA... Just as knowledgemanagement came to the forefront a number of years ago and companies and some of the larger accounting firms created executive level ...

This brings up the question - what falls within KM and what doesnt ? Can one consider the management of talent and competency as a way of managing a companies knowledge and intelligence. I would say yes. Please feel free to discuss this at http://www.insightknowledge.com

Monday, March 13, 2006

Just popped up on the Internet (launched 3 days ago): gabbly.com. Gabbly.com is a chat tool that is very easy to use. Simply put http://gabbly.com in front of the website you want to access and this website will open with gabbly as a website-specific chat (example: http://gabbly.com/http://www.insightknowledge.com. This is a great tool for customer support, meeting friends and exchanging experiences with others about a certain website. BAD websites watch out !!!

Monday, March 06, 2006

The March 14th KM Chicago meeting will play host to Stan Garfield of Hewlett-Packard's Worldwide Consulting & Integration Knowledge Management organization. He will talk about the KM program in the consulting organization.

The meeting will be held from 5-7 pm at both Factiva in the Loop and at Allstate in Northbrook. Stan will be joining us via webinar from Detroit. See location and connection details in the right navigation bar.

Bio: Stan Garfield is responsible for Worldwide Consulting & Integration Knowledge Management for Hewlett-Packard. He joined Digital Equipment Corporation in 1983 and launched Digital's first knowledge management program in 1996. Stan helped develop the corporate KM strategy for Compaq. He holds a degree in Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis.

The HP Services Consulting & Integration KM Program: The mission of the HP Services Consulting & Integration KM Program is to increase the reuse of intellectual capital to:

Increase win rate Drive down sales and delivery costs Increase engagement qualityThis presentation will explain the details of the HP Knowledge Management Program, including people, process, and technology components. Detailed examples of the following tools will provided

Knowledge Advisors Project Team Collaboration Project Profile Repository Communities of Practice Knowledge Briefs Specialized RepositoriesHP and Digital Equipment Corp. each started a KM program for their consulting businesses in 1996. Through the subsequent years, the organizations changed frequently, culminating in the merger of Compaq and HP in 2002. The newly-merged consulting & integration business had to deal with different cultures, KM systems, and personnel. The KM program has continued to experience significant change, including system migrations, team membership, and leadership. Our challenge has been to move from an emphasis on technology to an approach that balances people, process, and technology. We are also managing a demanding list of projects with a very small team.

For information on how to attend this meeting, please visit the KMChicago weblog.

Thursday, March 02, 2006

The non-for-profit GEEKCORPS (like peacecorps for computers) is helping with technical development work including in Africa. They currently have a need for Knowledge Management expertise. Please check it out at:http://www.geekcorps.org/default.asp

Monday, February 20, 2006

Asian companies and governments (!), here specially South Korea, are buying into and building out Knowledge Management solutions. The Korea Herald (subscription required) just posted an article that "a knowledge management system was also introduced to create and share knowledge between members of the Ministries and Agencies..". Homeland Security, please listen. Gurteen found some interesting cross-relationship (click here)

Well, I have to admit - it is an idea overdue - social networking on the plane. Myself being from Europe and traveling there at least once a year, always have to look forward to around 9 hours of sitting, watching, eating, more watching and more sitting. With a little luck there is somebody sitting next to you, you can talk to, but with a little less luck that person sits 5 rows away.

Now with social networking on the plane, I would be able to connect to people anywhere on the plane I want to connect to. Hmm, sounds good. I'll give it a try and report on it.

Monday, February 13, 2006

Please join the KM Chicago group on Tuesday, February 14th, 5:00 to 7:00 PM at the Allstate location in Northbrook, IL - South Plaza, G Auditorium for a presentation by

Tanya Brincat and Myrna Binamira, Accenture

Knowledge Management in the Asia-Pacific region

Scarcely a day goes by when we do not hear about the current and future economic impact of China and various other countries from the Asia Pacific region. Accenture has had a knowledge management presence in Asia since the mid 1990s. Two key people from their respective operating groups will discuss the evolving role of knowledge management at Accenture and their roles in developing and delivering knowledge services in Asia and around the world. Both of these women have been associated with knowledge management at Accenture for more than a decade. They have served their operating groups very ably during that time and have made many contributions to the global knowledge management efforts at Accenture. They and their respective teams have contributed to millions of dollars in consulting revenues over the past few years. Living and working in Asia they have a unique perspective on the cultural, language and technology barriers encountered by consultants in the region. Come get an Asia Pacific view of the successes, challenges, and evolving approaches that are faced by a global organization trying to deliver knowledge management services.

SpeakersTanya Brincat (Financial Services Knowledge Management, Accenture)Tanya Brincat has been involved in Knowledge Management since its inception at Accenture in 1992. She was seconded to Accenture's WHQ in Chicago in October 1992 where she spent 4 years working on the design, development and rollout of the core suite of databases to be made available on Accenture?s knowledge management system, the Knowledge XchangeTM.Since 1996 Tanya has served as a Knowledge Manager for the Financial Services Operating Group (Financial Services is one of the largest industry groups in Accenture with 12,000+ practice personnel globally; $3.4bn revenues in FY2005). After spending one year with the Financial Services Knowledge Management team in New York, Tanya returned to her native Australia where she currently serves as the Financial Services Knowledge Management lead for Asia Pacific (responsible for the provision of knowledge equipping and knowledge harvesting services to the FS practice in Asia Pacific) and the Global Head of Banking Knowledge Management (responsible for managing all Banking related knowledge capital on Accenture?s Knowledge XchangeTM and for developing all internal Banking communications).Prior to her Knowledge Management assignment at Accenture Tanya spent 4 years as a Management Consultant in Accenture's Change Management practice, where she specialized in instructional design. Tanya holds a Bachelor of Behavioral Science from La Trobe University (Melbourne, Australia).

Myrna A. Binamira (Director, Government Knowledge Network, Accenture)Myrna A. Binamira joined Accenture in 1995. Prior to that she was working for the Philippine Government and served for almost 18 years, the last 7 of which was as the CIO for the Department of Agriculture. As the CIO, she was in charge of the Department's IT and IS Program nationwide, and headed the Department's Computer Center. After that Government stint, she joined a private systems integrator company where she found herself selling Microsoft and Lotus Notes software. Sales turned out to be not her cup of tea so after a year of doing that, she went back to job searching and found this ad for Andersen Consulting.They were looking for a Director for their Government Knowledge Center. Needless to say, she got the job and had to start the organization from scratch. That was the most challenging job yet ever she had to face, but definitely also the most rewarding. Not very many people can actually single-handedly choose the people who will work for them. She has since then managed the KM Program of the Government Operating Group of Accenture and continues to do it with the same passion as when she started.

Friday, January 27, 2006

For those of you looking for a good open source technology to use to improve web-based collaboration, check this piece of software out: http://sourceforge.net/projects/opensharepoint/. It is an open source clone of Microsoft's Sharepoint and visually uses the same concept. It is easy to use (checkout the demo).

For those who look for more, please checkout TIKIWIKI. InsightKnowledge Inc.'s website is build with it and provides a variety of features all targeted to improve personal knowledge managing efficiency. Feel free to contact me for a demo. I will provide a free web presentation soon.

Thursday, January 26, 2006

Stanford University has started to provided recordings of select lectures, speeches, interviews and events available on through iTunes for free: http://itunes.stanford.edu

Providing knowledge for free is generally a good thing and a lot of people have the possibility to benefit from it. The effeciency of this effort could be much better, if there would be communities that could help assimilate this knowledge and serve as the 'virtual classroom'.

For more 'Free Knowledge' links and/or if you want to start a virtual classroom or community around any of the stanford offerings, please visit http://www.insightknowledge.com/

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

A study by researchers in Canada has shown that the snap decisions Internet users make about the quality of a web page have a lasting impact on their opinions.

So, you better update your website with some catchy design if you want people to stick around - is that what it means ? Shall we focus less on content ? Again, my believe is that a middle-way is the best way to go. No compromise on the quality of content, but improving the end-user interface experience is an increasingly important component of information technologies nowadays.

What does that mean ? I think it means that people are fed up with un-intuitive, complex, hard-to-use interfaces. It means that people work harder and longer and do not want to deal anymore with anything that makes it more difficult. My two cents.

Read more at http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060109/full/060109-13.html